Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

China Check-Up

I have a morbid fascination with China. The sheer scale of the place alone can make an ordinary story fantastic. The inhumane nature of its suddenly respectable dictatorship is always worth examining. As is the resiliency of the brave souls who fight against it.

The most important story to report is an old one–putting a number on Mao’s butchery. Mao was the greatest butcher of the 20th century and almost certainly human history. Hitler and Stalin fall by the wayside. Genghis Khan butchered a lot of people per capita, but there weren’t that many people back then. So I’m going to give the world’s worst butcher award to Mao. And respected historian Frank Dikotter has put a new number on Mao’s “body of work”–at least 45 million people killed just in the rough period of the Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962. Put 45 million people together and you get, by the latest census figures, the 30th largest country on earth. It would be like wiping out every person in Canada, plus another 11 million. This new figure will probably have an effect on his total tally, which was thought to have been pegged too high at 65 million in the 1997 classic The Black Book of Communism. This man was evil personified, yet somehow his regime leaves on and useful idiots in the West idolize him even now.

In contemporary China, the butchers of Beijing are again pissing in the eye of Tibet. This time, it’s new rules to require Mandarin in their schools. It is not like Tibetan is taking off anywhere outside of Tibet. It is not like kids in Beijing are forgetting Mandarin as they listen to Tibetan pop songs. This is just about crushing Tibetan culture and assimilating them.

In other news about people fighting back against the butchers of Beijing, the example of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo seems to be inspiring other dissidents. Let it inspire a whole generation of dissidents. Let the boatloads of Chinese students coming to the West to study go home with a critical eye to the evil of their regime. Let this nationalist bargain of crushed freedom in exchange for “national greatness” be put to rest.

Unfortunately, some of the useful idiots in the West look at this development and condemn it. You’ll remember that Norwegian fool Morits Skaugen we condemned to hell a few weeks back. Now we have a new person to hate, American journalist F. William Engdahl. He has written a charming little piece claiming that Liu Xiaobo is basically an American agent for his association with groups like PEN, the international writer’s NGO. Engdahl says America got him the Nobel. Why? “The reason China is being targeted? Simply because China today exists, and exists as a dynamically emerging world factor in economics and politics.” Yes, it has nothing to do with the fact that they execute people by the boatload, censor the internet, and crush their own people on a daily basis. Go back to the sewer you crawled out of, you death-worshiping hack.

And then let’s cap the blood sundae off with a realistic and awful cherry. Meet Ordos, just one of the fully-constructed ghost suburbs the Chinese are putting up. These ghost suburbs are so awful because they lay bare that China is sitting on a tremendous property bubble that must be fed. They are just building for the sake of building. And once it pops, the second-largest economy in the world will be left reeling and the recession will just get worse. Knowing that we need the butchers is one of the saddest things of all.